mpeg2 with pc and mac - Help

I just made my first DVD-R. It was an ordeal. Here is why. I do not have a burner, by our community college does. They are an Apple shop. Unfortunately, I am an orange user (Windows). The college uses Final Cut Pro and Media 100 for editing. There is an Avid DV3.5 stashed away somewhere.

I brought a couple of finished DV tapes I made with Raptor RT and Adobe Premier 6.0. realizing I would have to recapture the project into the Apple. The first project was a 32 minute photomontage with some video. First we used Final Cut Pro, but audio was out of sync, quite early in the project, and worse later. Then we captured with Media 100. The machine codec did much better. Perfect sync.

Now the hard part. I used a G4 dual 1 gig processors, with a Superdrive (DVD-R). The machine has Apple's IDVD, which is native Quicktime of course. I have available Apple's advanced DVD authoring program, but we did not use it because of its complexity. IDVD is drag and drop your final Cut Pro project in and go, but that did not work with the Media 100 file. Thus we exported the file to a Quick Time DV/DVCAM NTSC file. Over 3 hours later the 30 minute project was converted. Then I dragged and dropped it into IDVD. Next I clicked burn and about 90 minutes later it was through converting the file to Mpeg 2 and burning the disk.

I got the disk home and it started on both my Pioneer and Sharp DVD players. The picture along the edges was not smooth (antialiased?), the video was choppy an pixelated. Now the interesting part. After 15 minutes the video froze on one photo frame but the audio continued for the remaining 16 minutes. No idea what happened.

Now to get down to business. Since time is precious, but I am not sure I want a DVD burner at home yet, here are thoughts of mine and my instructor.

1. I recapture my video at home on my PC with seamless capture in Raptor RT software - I have never done this. C an it be done in Premier? Will there be an audio sync problem?).

2. I encode the video at home in Canopus DV NTSC using Soft Mpeg, load it off the PC into a portable firewire drive and bring it into the Apple - However will that file work in any of Apple's programs? Would it be compatable - does it need to be a Quicktime DV NTSC?

3. I have Cleaner 5 EZ that came with the DV Raptor RT. Never used it, don't know how to use it, don't quite know what it does.

Anyway. If I got my own burner Pioneer A05 or the new Sony, would my troubles go away. I am very indecisive about this and now unimpressed with what I see, and how much time this takes.

You should not be having sync problems with FCP. Chances are you need to update the FCP or make sure there is nothing wrong with your tape. Media 100 to iDVD is not good for quality. You could encode your DV clips to MPEG-2 on the PC with TMPG- the other program you mentioned won't cut it. But then you'd still need to return them to the Mac- which is a headache if the machines are not networked.

Bottom line- if you can afford a burner and some simple authoring software on the PC- that will be the most painless route. Otherwise the job will be much more complex and time-consuming.